Book Excerpt: The Compassionate Life, by Marc Barasch

Ode presents an exclusive book excerpt from The Compassionate Life: Walking the Path of Kindness (Berrett-Koehler, 2009), by Marc Ian Barasch.

Marc Ian Barasch | June/July 2009 issue

Both are (in this practice, at least) obstacles, obscurations; they get in the way of a lovingkindness beyond mere personal preference. It's not unlike the Christian practice of “discernment,” which a theologian once described to me as “learning to see in a way that is consonant with God's way of seeing. As long as there's ego-attachment,” she said, “we're seeing other people in a funhouse mirror. As long as our eyes are clouded by longing, needing other people to be this way or that for us, there's no such thing as compassion.” I'd always admired Christianity's emphasis on doing good, but here was a practice of seeing good that resembled Eastern-style meditation. I had always wondered about the relationship between this inner Christianity and more churchly forms of worship. If I wanted to get a real insight, I was told, I should talk to Father Thomas Keating, the monk who had almost singlehandedly revived the contemplative method of realizing God's illimitable love.

To get to Father Keating's monastery, you must pass, as all pilgrims must do, through a vale of temptation, in this case the Gulch of Glitz known as Aspen. I manage to ignore all its allurements (save a real New York–style Reuben with meltingly tender pastrami), heading out past the private airport where sleek personal jets take off and land with a purling roar.

All's quiet a few miles down a dirt road at Saint Benedict's Monastery, its soaring, carved wood architecture at once a psalm to the earth and a paean to whatever lies beyond. Father Keating emerges to greet me. An eighty-one-year-old man in a plaid wool shirt, watchcap plunked on his bald head, he could be an ancient mariner home from the sea or some ex-stevedore hired as keeper of the bell tower. For him, God's love calls for workmanlike practice. “Jesus had a formula,” he tells me as we sit practically knee to knee in his cramped office. “In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, ‘Pray to your Father, your Abba, your Daddy, in secret.' Go into your inner room at the center of your being. Close the door, not just to the external noise and distraction but to the inner dialogue too.”

Keating speaks in lovely, loping, run-on sentences. When I close my eye, his deep, creaky voice conjures some old cricket sachem, sawing a rhythmic evensong on long bowstring legs. “You have to silence the emotional programs that sustain who you think you are,” he says, “allow the ego's self-reflective apparatus to fade out, put aside that false self based on childhood emotions—the reaching out for happiness, security, approval, affection, esteem, all those exaggerated needs we impose on others—and just do nothing. “But not just nothing. Rather nothing of our own but everything of what God proposes we do. God prefers this kind of love—not what you're willing to do but what you're willing to receive. Our lack of confidence in his great love is the only problem.” Although this isn't a particularly funny remark, he smiles with such gentle irony that I can't help but burst out laughing, feeling some perfusion of high seriousness and puckish joy.

“We say that when you enter prayer, nothing is worth thinking about,” he says, peering out through his enormous round glasses, “whether it's a sense perception, memory, plan, concept, or image. It doesn't mean no thoughts but to disregard them. They're placed in the ‘cloud of forgetting,' which contains the ultimate knowledge of what is but which is unknown to the intellect.”

I suggest that it must be hard for someone who is so clearly an intellectual to relinquish all thought and center himself in the heart. Father Keating smiles. “All you need is a willingness to suffer and a willingness to love.” All the rest of it, he stresses, is the false self and its gnat cloud of petty thinking that obscures love's ultimate Source. So far as he's concerned, organized religion has too often swarmed with the gnats instead of soared with the angels. “Such a shame what we've done to the Mystery,” he murmurs with a sigh, “with all our naive loyalties!”

The history of religion is not an uninterrupted purview of the Good Eye. Alongside its numberless good deeds are uncounted (and unaccountably) bad ones. It's tragicomic to hear, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, imams promising Paradise to infidelslayers, pastors invoking a Prince of Peace who sounds more like Rambo, rabbis sanctifying biblical land-grabs, Buddhist priests blessing military juntas. (I recently heard a cleric, who surely spoke for sectarians everywhere, decree from the pulpit, “Everyone is created by God, but not everyone is a child of God.”) A good organizational consultant would counsel the world's major faiths to reexamine their original mission statements: The core business of Jesus Inc. or Allah Ltd. or Moses Corp. or Buddha LLC is surely not to sell tickets to heaven or peddle get-out-of-hell-free cards but to distribute every kernel of wisdom from their ancient storehouses that might help us love one another.

We are slowly emerging from millennia of holy know-it-alls beaning each other with their Infallible Books, passing judgment with their Divine Laws, and trying to enforce competing copyrights on Ultimate Truth. The God of our times is no longer some Big Eye in the Sky but the Good Eye itself. He is turning into what Friedrich Nietzsche, who preferred deities of blood and thunder, once sneeringly called a “changed god...Now he counsels ‘peace of soul,' hate-no-more, forbearance, even ‘love' of friend and enemy... Now he is merely the good god.”

I'll take him. So will, it seems, a lot of other people. In churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques around the world, there has been a quiet revival of the inner traditions for transforming the heart. Just as the formula for baking a loaf of bread is similar across cultures, the same techniques for compassion seem to crop up everywhere: loosen the bonds of discursive thought, extend the circle of caring, cease armoring against suff ering, wish for others the same happiness you wish for yourself.

“Religious stories are training,” a rabbi once told me, “not just rulebooks.” At their best the practices we call spiritual are triedand-true ways to unplug from the ego's matrix and awaken from delusory life, to shut the biased and nearsighted Squinty Eye and open the Good Eye wide. The Little Prince said it as well as anybody: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.”

Such seeing, however, may require deliberately redirecting the gaze. Awhile back I decided to unplug my television. I wanted to clear my head of mass culture with its endless parade of imaginary characters who not only clutter the mind but, I began to think, subtly sidetrack the heart. In my TV's old corner, I've created a small shrine, an experimental compassion lab. Arrayed among the candles, incense, and homemade icons are photos of friends and loved ones, little endorphin triggers, jump-starts for the heart. There's also a photo of Juan, the seven-year-old Salvadoran I've started sponsoring through an international aid agency. Th is little boy, in his faded Spiderman T-shirt and dirty blue pants, has become part of my orbit of caring, a link to the larger human family. I've also included some pictures of people I really don't like. I try to breathe in their suffering and breathe out my goodness. I remind myself I don't need to reserve a stash of happiness for my exclusive use. Like digital data, infi nitely replicable because it has no substance or extrinsic cost, I can aff ord to give it away, even to those whom I deem undeserving. There's more where that came from.

To all this, you might well say, “So what?” Don't just sit there, do something. The world is on fire, or it's drowning. Too many people are tragically dying, too many lucklessly born. And it's true: The Good Eye should guide the Good Hand, set the Good Feet in motion. But I believe that old existentialist Albert Camus had it right: “We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.” Inner transformation doesn't supplant outward action but nourishes it. I project less on others of my own need for redemption. Do-gooding becomes more alloyed with be-gooding. The Good Eye is not merely a gaze but a creative force, like the penetrating sunlight that quickens a buried seed. Am I getting anywhere? Is there anywhere to get? These days I can feel unexpectedly pierced by something I hear, something I see, some stray thread of feeling I might have overlooked. I've placed a few eye drops in the Good Eye. I'll sometimes feel a soft explosion of warmth or ache in my chest and think that it's my heart shaking off its torpor. I hear it murmuring; maybe someday it will shout.

Reprinted with permission from Berrett-Koehler

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